


Already Burned

by Inert_PenMaid



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 12:47:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3610635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inert_PenMaid/pseuds/Inert_PenMaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Gravedigger considers that his soul might be saved. And his feelings for a certain Stark he knew long ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Already Burned

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! What began as a jotting of some hypothetical Gravedigger!Sandor thoughts became a fully-fledged piece. I've been on a hiatus from my main Fanfiction over at .Net and was looking for a foothold into prose again. I've never written for ASOIAF and so it's completely out of my comfort zone - but my SanSan feels were far too great. I've admired a lot of stunning SanSan fanfiction and really wanted to try it. It's currently 3:42 am and so I do apologise for typos or inconsistencies or generally shite quality; my eyes are tired. 
> 
> I'm not sure that this is a one-shot; I'm not sure that it's a chapter either. In fact I'm not sure I know what this piece is even about. But - it's SOMETHING. 
> 
> Warnings: Language, mainly (for now). 
> 
> Cheers for reading! :)

** Already Burned **

_Driftwood_ was the name they’d given him, as though the monks thought a new name would be the thing to change him. A grimace tightened in the Sexton’s scarred left cheek, unmaking the meanness of his mouth but briefly. It was a smile, but he and his scars felt nought of it. Sensation was as much a part of the smile as was joy; like a child wrought of rape, or a fire that cast only cold. _Driftwood,_ he grinned emptily as he watched the stallion trumpeting in his stall from across the lichyard. _More the fools, you. That name is all for null._  

Of course he remembered what the horse had been long ago. Long before _Driftwood._ He had ridden the destrier himself: into war and into tourneys and beside royal processions, where he had been sworn shield to the child-king Joffrey and before him his regent mother, Cersei. House Clegane was pledged to the Lannisters of Casterly Rock, one of many pegs to keep the Lion’s standard at-wind. _Hound, I was called._ Not for the helm, no – that had come later, to piss on every jester’s son who fancied fitting themselves for a coxcomb – but for his loyalty.

And the Hound _was_ loyal. He had even donned that White Cloak for a time, though on several counts had stood in it and failed all it bespoke. The Cloak was like putting on a new man: a man who could beat and murder and rape until the cloth he wore ran red as flayed flesh, and yet all the eyes of King’s Landing would swear to you that it was white; Ned Stark’s girl had done no more to yank the Throne from under Joffrey’s feet than some dross-drunk in Flea Bottom, but he had his Kingsguard beat the treachery from her all the same.

_He commanded me – once._ Clegane swallowed at a mass in his throat, remembering. Had the Fool not intervened... _I would have. Might have._ The Little Bird had been pretty and hollow-headed - but innocent.

 Quite suddenly, the spade in the Hound’s hands plunged and broke the soil. _But I swore no Ser’s vow._ He flung the soil over his shoulder and started again, over and over. _Lannister gold capitalised the skin on my arse, Little Bird, not the innocent. I owed you nothing. Not even a cheek of it._

But no price had moved his hand to drag the Wolf-Bitch from the massacre at the Twins. And no price could have kept him from _her_ , the night of the battle.

_I meant take her. I should have._ The memory was like holding a hand over open flame. He snatched it away, but he was already burned.                                                                                                                     

The grave was almost threefold its previous size, Sandor realised. The cavity opened up at his feet like a maw, exertion closing his chest like a fist as he bore over it, heaving. A membranous, shrill sweat had started in his clothes. Unable to bear the darkness any longer, the Hound lifted his eyes and saw day’s last light shrinking away from the world, retiring into the closed purple lids of evenfall. _Shorter days, colder nights._

Winter was felling.

A complaint in his left hand forced him to stop digging. He flexed it, watching the filigree of old white scars catch the light. They reminded him of an old maester at his father’s keep who would chide him as a boy for the heavy-handedness of his letters; the parchment would often read on both sides, scarred. _That same maester knew much and more of scars,_ the boy would remember later, lying half-a-corpse in the coverlets of his bed. Sometimes he was sworn to it that he could still smell the ointment.

It took him a moment to realise the world around him had begun to shimmer. _Brine from the Trident,_ the Hound told himself, thumbing at a stinging in his eyes. _Ash from the fires._

The lichyard was wet with moonlight when he became aware of someone approaching. Clegane did not lift his gaze. “You could call that horse Ned fucking Stark for all the good it would do you. _Driftwood_ might sit on the ear soft as a buoyed shite, but Stranger’ll have your face off, Monk, if you give him half a chance.” He waited for the terse reply, a look, but it never came. The Hound bristled.  “Once, they paid me to _make_ the dead. Not accommodate them.”

“Such is your penance.” Elder Brother strode up alongside him, his hands cupping either forearm beneath his the sleeves of his habit. Cold air whorled as he spoke. “The beast will have to be gelded if he does not temper. I had hoped Driftwood would better befit.”  

 “A name don’t fate a damn thing, and you know it.”

“Fate, no. But _change_ a thing. Yes.” 

Sandor snorted. “We’re not philosophers here, or poets. Just rapers and man-maids and eunuchs. The only difference ‘tween this place and the Wall is that the rapers up there are bloody-well colder.”

Elder Brother’s watery eyes lifted with warning. “You’ll want to care for that tongue, in time.”

The Hound smirked. _And there is the look._ The wait had been worthwhile. He relished it, as he’d relished watching the Little Bird’s pretty mouth quiver with disgust whenever he spoke a word around her. “Don’t mind me, Monk,” he waved at the air. “Go on.”

“A devil in man’s skin sacks the riverlands in your name as we speak.” Elder Brother did not call him by his name, nor did he call him _novice_. _I am no Brother just yet._ “Even to go so far as molesting a child of eleven. No, I need not lesson you in the authority of names, I think. Beast, or otherwise.”

Sandor Clegane understood. “Should have called _me_ Driftwood.”

The monk’s mouth broadened. “Oh, but you already have a name.”

“Blood. Too much blood.” He scowled his refusal. “A man can strike a mark or two from his name. But blood – blood’s harder to scrub clean.”

“From a _name_ , aye.” Elder Brother agreed. “But I do not speak of the Hound. What of the man? What of Sandor Clegane?”

The thought discomfited him. He paused awhile before he spoke again, careful to elect words that would not betray his confusion. “You talk like I am one and not the other.”

“Is that not the truth of it?” Elder Brother’s eyes brimmed with glee. “One is but a name. The other is... an essence.”

“A _soul,_ you mean.” Sandor Clegane rasped wearily. _Piety always finds itself a foothold_. “You’re like the boy in a brothel who’s too shy to pull out his prick. Say what you damned mean, monk. And if it _is_ souls we’re talking, then you can have it on good faith mine’s blacker than the rot in a septa’s cunt.”

Elder Brother’s jaw tightened. “You jape and you mock. Yet the soul has no resting place. It endures. You cannot _cast it aside_ as you can a name.”

The Little Bird had once warned him he was Hell-bound, also. “I need none of your forgiveness, _monk_.”

“Contrition is your only avenue. Listen to me: a Septon comes. Septon Meribald. Speak with him – please. Speak with him in the light of the Seven -”

 “Have you clods of _shite_ in both ears, monk, or no?” Sandor rounded on the other man and jabbed at the ruined side of his face with a forefinger: “No Gods ever spared me a look before. Not when my own brother did _this_. Not when I near perished of the fever that came after it.” That ruined side still felt nothing, and remembered everything. The night of the Blackwater, he’d gone to Sansa Stark and vowed to kill the next man who hurt her. _I offered her that song she spent her life tripping over, a song of knights and fair maidens._ But the White Cloak was like putting on a new man, and that new man was no more a knight than the Hound was. _So I took the song, she never gave it._ And though his scarred mouth felt nothing, it remembered. “I never licked the boot of no God before. What’s in your head to think I’m about to get a taste for it, now?”

“If you wish to bury the Hound – as I believe you do – then you will. Sandor Clegane is only as good a name as the man who lives in it. Do you think your Sansa Stark would love a Fool, or Florian?”

A silence burgeoned between them that left rawness parrying the air in his throat. “If there’s Hells like you say, I’ve no intent on getting burned thrice. I’ll see about this contrition. I’ll see this Septon...I’ll see this _Merry_ - _Bald_.”

“Good. Four days hence, he comes. In the meanwhile, Sexton...” Elder Brother toed the edge of the fresh grave with his sandals. “There is work to be done.”


End file.
